donuts

I love Evangelion. I don’t love this stupid bullremoved.

Hardware wise, you’ll be hard pressed to find any even half-way popular computer that can’t run some form of Linux. So I’d say just get something that’s within your budget. Those x86 APU-based mini pcs that you can find for ~$200 are becoming pretty popular for projects these days. Something like a Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi or whatever might also be fine depending on what you want to do with it, just keep your power expectations in check. If you want to spend more money on something with graphics hardware, I’d recommend going for AMD over NVidia, just because the drivers are built into the kernel and essentially no-hassle.

When it comes to software, especially if you’re on x86, just arbitrarily pick one of the reasonably popular distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, PopOS, or any of the other ones you’ve probably heard of. One of the first things to learn about “Linux” is that there’s a whole ecosystem of software projects behind it, and there is a lot of overlap between the software that each distro runs. Yes, there are some meaningful differences between, for example, Ubuntu and Fedora, but I think they are much less meaningful to a noobie (who is just learning the basics of Linux) or an expert (who probably knows enough to bend and customize just about any distro into whatever they want).

Small caveat #1: If you prefer to have a desktop that more closely resembles Windows (like the one of the Steam Deck’s desktop mode) you might want to pick a distro spin that uses the KDE Plasma desktop. On the other hand, if you want to play around with something that’s a bit different than what you’re used to, it might be worth checking out a distro spin that uses the Gnome desktop. I can recommend them both for different reasons, so you might want to check out some videos of them to see what you’re more into before picking. (Other desktops are available, these are just the two big ones! So there truly are a ton of options to explore here if you want to.)

Small caveat #2: At this point in time are you more interested in stability or customization? If you want a truly rock-solid Linux system that’s hard to ever break, you might want to consider one of the new “atomic” distributions like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite (or others), though you might find some of their limitations annoying. On the other side of the spectrum, if deep customization and flexibility is what you’re looking for, then you might want to venture into the deep end with things like NixOS or ArchLinux, just keep in mind that they can be very technical and overwhelming for noobs. Personally I have been using Fedora Silverblue for a couple years now and I love the stability of it, and I can work around it’s limitations with distrobox.

Another thing to consider is just using what you already have. For example, playing around with Linux in a virtual machine, setting up a Linux-based server on one of the popular VPS services, or just plugging your Steam Deck into a dock with a keyboard and monitor attached and playing with something like distrobox (which you can probably find a guide on how to set that up for your deck).

Modartt’s Pianoteq is a nice Linux native, physically modeled piano plugin.

In my experience yabridge is fantastic. With a bit of initial setup, it’s the closest thing to a native experience that I’ve come across.

You do control it with a CLI interface, so you need to be comfortable with that.

You also need to have already installed the Windows VSTs manually using WINE or whatever, and so there’s a bit of a typical “how well does this work under wine” crapshoot and a bit of a learning curve there.

I can see from your other post that you’re talking about Facebook’s role in the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar, right? I think this part of the wikipedia article is relevant to the conversation:

The internet.org initiative was brought to Myanmar in 2015. Myanmar’s relatively recent democratic transition did not provide the country with substantial time to form professional and reliable media outlets free from government intervention. Furthermore, approximately 1% of Myanmar’s residents had internet access before internet.org. As a result, Facebook was the primary source of information and without verifiable professional media options, Facebook became a breeding ground for hate speech and disinformation. “Rumors circulating among family or friends’ networks on Facebook were perceived as indistinguishable from verified news by its users.”[227] Frequent anti-Rohingya sentiments included high Muslim birthrates, increasing economic influence, and plans to takeover the country. Myanmar’s Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees. [Emphasis added by me, btw.]

Like I said above, I got off Facebook more than a decade ago and I don’t use their products. As a platform it has been very well documented that Facebook has been a hive for disinformation and social unrest in [probably] every country and language on Earth. You and I might avoid Facebook and Meta like a plague, but the sad truth is that Facebook has become ubiquitous all over the world for all kinds of communication and business. Weirdos like us are here on the fediverse, but the average person has never even heard of this removed, don’t you agree?

So what’s my point? Why is any of that relevant?

As true as it is that Facebook was complicit in the atrocities in Myanmar (as well as social unrest and chaos on a global scale), a key component there is centralization, imo.

There are an estimated ~7,000 languages on Earth today across ~200 countries. To put it bluntly, what I’m saying is that content moderation across every language and culture on Earth is infeasible, if not straight-up impossible. Facebook will never be able to do it, nor will Google, X, Bluesky, Tiktok, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other company. In light of that it’s actually shocking that Facebook had 2 Burmese speakers among their staff in the first place, considering many companies have 0. In other words, there is no single centralized social network on Earth who can combat against global disinformation, hate speech, etc. I think we can all agree to that. Hell, even Meta’s staff would probably agree to that.

So what’s the solution to disinformation, hate speech and civil unrest?

Frankly I’m not sure that there is one, simple solution, as the openness and freedom of the internet will always allow for someone, somewhere, to say and do bad things. But at the same time I strongly believe that federation and decentralization can be at least a part of the solution, as it give communities of every nation and language on Earth the power and agency to manage and moderate their own social networks.

I think you and I probably feel similarly about Facebook (and, for me at least, Tiktok, Instagram, X, and other toxic centralized corporate social networks that put profit about all else). After all, that’s why we’re talking here instead of there, right? I would much rather have everyone just leave Facebook for somewhere that is owned and controlled by individual communities. But that’s simply not in our power. And so, at least as I see it, ActivityPub becoming a widely-adopted standard for inter-network communication at least creates more opportunity for decentralization and community-moderation.

As long as Facebook remains the single dominant venue for communication and news across the world (and all of those ~7000 languages), we will continue to see linguistic minorities hurt the most by disinformation and hate on the internet.

For me personally there are two main forces at play here:

1. I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don’t use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic removed, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.

2. Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it’s a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.

I don’t really know for sure, but I’d have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty removeding narrow. We’d be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it’d also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it…

So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.

I’m perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I’m willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).

From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.

From a cultural standpoint, I’m also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc… Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase–and that’s the Fediverse working as intended, imo.

Which is hopefully a pretty good sign for the idea of the fediverse and open protocols in general.

Make sure you’re following hashtags on Mastodon. I see plenty of people posting stuff like art, food and gaming opinions because I’m following a bunch of topics that interest me.

When it comes to Linux, it’s only natural that FOSS people are more interested in the fediverse than the average normie, because that’s where all of this stuff came from. I know FOSS people who have been using Mastodon for years and years.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I think a fedi-connected, self-hosted Bandcamp alternative would be huge for discoverability and helping fans keep tabs on new releases, tour dates, etc… As a musician it’d be great to be able to have fans be alerted right away when you post a new track or tour date, and as a fan it’d be awesome to be able to follow artists that you like from other fedi-compatible platforms.

I’m not a web dev myself so I don’t really know for sure, but I think the biggest challenge is probably not even content delivery but keeping track of ownership/library. It’s really nice that you can log into Bandcamp and access a library of all of the albums/songs that you’ve previously bought, and I’m not sure how something like that could be emulated in a federated way. It might be possible, I just don’t know how!

Also it’d be nice to be able to stream your library, and when your library is distributed across multiple federated servers I don’t know if that becomes more difficult to implement.

Still, I’m with you. I’d love to see a federated alternative to Bandcamp, even if it takes some years to reach maturity or feature parity.

Uh, yeah… So, basically I use an ubuntu:latest (LTS) distrobox container which has:

1. Its own $HOME, specified using the --home parameter when making a distrobox container.
2. Wine-staging
3. Yabridge
4. Bitwig Studio 5 (the Linux .deb version, installed with dpkg to the default location)
5. A whole bunch of Linux native plugins (like Modartt Pianoteq, installed wherever but then with the .so’s symlinked into my ~/.vst dirs).
6. A whole bunch of Windows plugins (like an old version of Kontakt, SampleTank, AudioModelling SWAM, MODO Drum/Bass, etc.), installing in the WINEPREFIXES that live in the distrobox container’s $HOME. (I then use yabridge inside the container to bridge them all for Linux.)
7. I think I also have Pipewire installed inside the audio production container, but I can’t remember if that’s necessary or not.

Finally, I use the distrobox-export command to export Bitwig Studio to my host system, so I can run it as you normally would, just hitting the start key and clicking on the Bitwig icon.

So it’s kind of a complicated setup initially, but from day to day it’s really easy to use. I just open Bitwig, load up whatever Linux or Windows VST (the Wine ones take a little longer to initialize that I’d like but it’s not too bad), and just make music. :)

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_tips.md#container-save-and-restore

I think I followed this. I think you have to do it through podman/docker (whichever your distrobox is using).

It almost just worked, but again I had to fix a couple of Wine symlinks to get all of my Windows VSTs working again… (I also had to reregister some VSTs in certain cases.)

Another unrelated but useful thing to look into wrt distrobox is distrobox-assemble, especially if you have a few different distrobox containers dedicated to different tasks. I could go on and on about this stuff, lmao.

I’ve heard good things about Studio1, but I haven’t tried it myself.

Oh yeah, and speaking of Distrobox…

I also happen to have all of my audio production software (DAWs, Plugins, Wine, Yabridge, etc.) living in an Ubuntu-based distrobox container, which has the added benefit of allowing me to export save the entire container and drop it mostly painlessly* onto a different machine. It’s really cool to be able to pick up my entire music making environment and bring it with me, but it might be a bit overboard for some people. I don’t have much of a choice other than to use distrobox since I run Fedora Silverblue as my daily driver. lol

*It doesn’t work flawlessly, because I sometimes have to fix some important Wine symlinks that break when doing this.

Yeah! Don’t sleep on it! I can say without reservation that yabridge is essential for me. :)

The basic yabrigde workflow is:

1. Install wine-staging and yabridge on your distro of choice.
2. Use wine to install all of your Windows VSTs somewhere. (I prefer to use a separate WINEPREFIX for each plugin maker, but that’s probably not fully necessary). If you don’t know much about Wine this can be a bit hard to wrap your mind around, but that’s another story.
3. Then you run yabridgectl add where all of your various Windows VST dll files are (instead of whatever Wine prefix you installed them in).
4. And then when you run yabridgectl sync yabridge will create a .so bridge library for each of your Windows VSTs and spit them out into ~/.vst3 or whatever.
5. Finally you point your DAW of choice to ~/.vst3 or whatever, and your WIndows VSTs should hopefully show up and work just like they do on Windows (with the usual caveat of Wine being pretty great but not always perfect).

Sadly there’s no good GUI frontend for it (that I know of at least), but as far as CLI tools it’s pretty easy to learn and use. Also, you may want to make sure that you’ve got realtime privilages setup on your system, and you can find guides to doing that in the yabridge wiki.

But yeah, I’ve got a bunch of Windows VSTs from Native Instruments and IK Multimedia and a bunch of others too, and they are work very well when bridged these days, so I’m able to use Linux for music without sacrificing anything.

I do gaming and music production on Linux without much issue at all these days.

Most games are pretty easy to work with these days thanks to Steam, Lutris, and Bottles.

As for audio, there are 4 key ingredients to my setup: Pipewire, Bitwig Studio, Wine and Yabridge.

Pipewire is pretty easy to use and works in a low latency setting just fine, so imo you no longer have to juggle PulseAudio + JACK.

Bitwig isn’t open source, but it’s fantastic and inspiring and supports Linux natively. They’ve also been great about stuff like the new open source CLAP plugin format.

I’ve found that Wine (staging) does a pretty reasonable job handling any Windows VST I’ve thrown at it, but it’s a bit of work getting it setup, especially if you’re new to the concept.

And finally yabridge is a great CLI tool for turning all of your Windows plugin .dlls into Linux .so, that you can easily use in your DAW of choice.

So if you want to do music production on Linux then definitely check out Bitwig and Reaper (along with Ardour, like you mentioned). And personally, I think that if you have a decent chunk of Windows VSTs it’s worth investing a bit of time learning how to getting them working in Wine and then bridged with yabridge.

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I’ve never run a server, so I can’t really say much about how sustainable it is to do it right now, but ultimately I don’t see why it should be able less sustainable than running any other popular website.

Granted, I think you’re totally right that there’s a generally unsustainable attitude that’s pervasive on the fediverse and the open source community in general, which amounts to a sentiment that “someone else will pay for all this”. It’s wrong, it’s naive, it’s unhelpful, and it’s basically an express lane towards the tragedy of the commons. I’ve worked for non-profits and I’ve seen first hand how difficult it can be to turn users into supporters, but the sad truth is that non-profits are just like businesses in the sense that if costs are higher than revenue they will not survive very long, and this is true for community run fediverse services too.

I do think that people who like the fediverse should want it to become financially sustainable, at the very least.

I’m open to the idea of limited, non-invasive ads for example. (Plus I think that if the fediverse ever becomes massively popular we’re going to see thinly veiled ads anyway, in the form of “influencers” and “sponsored content”. That’s inevitable, and honestly probably even worse that straight-forward ads.) I would not leave my Kbin.social or my current Mastodon instance if there were a small number of ads.

Also I could be wrong on this but IIRC, Misskey supports user data storage quotas that can be expanded for a price. And I think that’s potentially a smart and sustainable method of getting those people who make heavy use of their server to chip in a little bit. If someone wants to post a lot of images, audio and video to their Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, Lemmy, etc., instance then I think it’s reasonable to expect them to cover some small fraction of the hosting cost by becoming a paying member or paying for a server-level storage plan.

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Pipewire seems to do everything better than PulseAudio, in my experience. It’s stable, compatible with PulseAudio and JACK stuff, works for low latency stuff like music production, can be routed flexibly, etc… As someone who used to run a PulseAudio+JACK stack but has since replaced both with just PipeWire, I’m a big fan.

It’s an immutable distro akin to Fedora Silverblue, which means it’s theoretically extremely solid but you can’t easily change the base system.

And while I haven’t tried it myself, the thing that seems to set VanillaOS apart from something like Silverblue is that is built around the idea of containing various subsystems based on other distros (like an Ubuntu subsystem and an Arch subsystem), which should make it easy to install packages from a variety of distro (or even the AUR, for another example) on top of a very solid, static base system. Under the hood it uses a container management tool called Distrobox to achieve that, but it seems to be pretty nicely abstracted for user simplicity.

I daily drive Fedora Silverblue and I do something similar with distrobox for things that don’t make sense to install as Flatpaks. In other words, on my system I have an immutable base system (with optional package layering, rollbacks, rebasing, etc.), then flatpaks or appimages for most simple applications (firefox, blender, krita, etc.), and finally distrobox to handle various dev environments and music production environment (which relies on wine and a lot of plugins).

VanillaOS is something like that, but out of the box, and aiming to be GUI-user friendly.